SEQUIM — These nontraditional people — who call themselves the Burning Down the House collective — will turn traditional for a fleeting moment Saturday.
The Burning bunch will have a ribbon cutting to celebrate their existence as a “creative collective,” a network of artists who work at home, sell their art around the planet, and sometimes don’t leave the house for days.
Lisa Kendrick of Port Angeles, for example, recently shipped her handbags, via her Web site XSbaggageandCo.com, to Bulgaria.
She’s been a cottage industry for four years now; about a year ago she joined Burning, a group that includes nine other rural business owners.
On Saturday, members of the Burning collective will emerge from their homes for the ribbon cutting organized by the Sequim-Dungeness Valley Chamber of Commerce.
The 10 a.m. snip heralds another event known as the Opulent Art Show; both will take place at The Cutting Garden, a lavish farm north of Sequim where enormous dahlias and other blooms proliferate.
The show is an apt coming-out party for the Burning collective, said cofounder Renne Brock-Richmond, who makes apparel and sells it on her Web site, www.UniqueAsYou.com.
Behind closed doors in Sequim, Port Angeles and Dungeness, Burning’s women are making wearable art out of digital prints, tie-dyed fabric, beach glass and funky beads, or painting fantastical images of horses, or building picture frames and fine-art photographs.
The artists market their work online, maintaining customer bases that reach from Seattle to Miami to Eastern Europe.
“The Opulent Art Show gives us a chance to share our work with the local community,” amid the Cutting Garden’s floral splendor, Brock-Richmond said.
Maggie Parks, a commercial and fine art photographer — maggielparks@hotmail.com — who lives near Sequim, moved here after graduating from the Art Institute of Seattle. She said belonging to Burning provides her with insights into various ways to grow a company at home.
“We’ve formed a core group,” Brock-Richmond added. “We’re looking at giving workshops and lectures,” for others who are thinking about, or have already begun, home-based and online businesses.
But the burning question must be asked: What’s with the name?
“It’s all my fault,” said Brock-Richmond.
‘Not normal way’
“Burning Down the House” was a hit song by the 1970s-through-80s rock band Talking Heads, about “not doing things the ‘normal’ way,” she said.
The lyrics mention a house that’s “out of the ordinary,” where there’s “no visible means of support.”
“You have not seen nothing yet,” the song says, adding, “Everything’s stuck together.”
That sort of fits the collective attitude, Parks said. The artists provide moral and mechanical support for one another; she’s photographed member Mary Beth Beuke’s sea-glass jewelry — www.WestCoastSeaGlass.net SEmD for Coastal Living magazine. And Beuke said another jewelry artist in the collective, Mary Beth Blake of Irresistible Beadworks, www.marybethblake.etsy.com, inspires her.
“For me, it’s encouragement,” Kendrick added. She sometimes works for days on end, alone, to keep her one-woman design and manufacturing business humming.
“It’s nice to know,” she said, “I can connect with someone who gets that.”
Also members of Burning Down the House are artists Marliese Bankert, www.ArtisticHangups.blogspot.com; mixed-media artist Pam Erickson of Pacific Currents, pacific.currents@olypen.com; glass artist Sandi Hokenson, www.GlassworksbySandi.etsy.com; tie-dye clothing maker Katie Irvin, www.tiemee.com; and painter Melissa Klein, www.osisart.com.
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
